As function, and hence complexity, of electronic circuits increases, the art is faced with ever more challenges to stay on the path of delivering better performance. The mainstay material of microelectronics is silicon (Si), or more broadly, Si based materials. One such Si based material of importance for microelectronics is the silicon-germanium alloy: Si1-xGex, with “x” indicating the fraction of germanium. In many advanced semiconductor circuits, differing components, such as P or N type devices, three dimensional devices, possibly optical devices, may have such variations in their requirements that processing them all in a single material would compromise performance. Often there is a need to deposit high quality materials, frequently differing kind of materials, during the fabrication of the semiconductor structures.
For depositing high quality material layers one is typically in need of atomically clean surfaces onto which the deposition can take place. A problem encountered in the art is that atomically clean Si surfaces are very difficult to produce, and cleaning a Si surface usually involves high temperature. However, there is an advantage to be able to obtain a clean Si surface at lower temperatures, at which temperatures no harm occurs to those structures that are already fabricated when the need for a new material deposition arises.